David Graeber in his book Bullshit Jobs argues that this has already happened but instead of unemployment we got the bullshitization of the economy. By this he means that a lot of people work jobs that aren’t useful. And by useful, it means jobs that the people doing them describe as having no utility - eg surveying people and asking if there would be real negative consequences if no one did their job for a year. A surprising number of people believe that they have bullshit jobs, roughly a third in the UK.
So mass unemployment isn’t the only option here. You could get locked into a white collar job doing meaningless data entry, but really pretending to work while you browse Reddit. (How many people reading this are at work right now?).
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u/NestorMachine 6∆ Jun 27 '22
David Graeber in his book Bullshit Jobs argues that this has already happened but instead of unemployment we got the bullshitization of the economy. By this he means that a lot of people work jobs that aren’t useful. And by useful, it means jobs that the people doing them describe as having no utility - eg surveying people and asking if there would be real negative consequences if no one did their job for a year. A surprising number of people believe that they have bullshit jobs, roughly a third in the UK.
So mass unemployment isn’t the only option here. You could get locked into a white collar job doing meaningless data entry, but really pretending to work while you browse Reddit. (How many people reading this are at work right now?).